Investigating Artificial Black Holes

Robber Baron writes "I remember years ago watching a cartoon in which an inventor had managed to create 'portable holes.' Now along those lines, according to this story in the Christian Science Monitor, scientists are on the threshhold of developing the 'do-it-yourself black hole' (Well, no, it's not quite do-it yourself as you need a pretty large collider to pull it off.) They're hoping to use the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research to create many tiny black holes and observe the Hawking Effect as they dissipate. Keep your shotgun handy though, as they are more than likely going to open up a portal into another dimension and all sorts of nasties are going to come pouring out."

Comments

Is this dangerous?

[Sanity]

I always thought that if a black hole existed on Earth there would be a risk that it would start to pull in the matter around it, exponentially increasing its own mass and eventually sucking in the entire planet.

I assume this won't happen, but can anyone explain why?

Re:It was Wile E Coyote

[antiquark]

The thing that always stuck me about Wile E Coyote's plans is that occasionally he would have a brilliant plan, but something would go wrong, the rope would come loose, or the buckle would break.

Then he's move onto the next plan.

I'd be yelling at the TV, "Try it again! It's a good bloody plan!"

The other amusing thing about this is I keep seeing the same situation in real life. Someone would try one thing, it would go wrong, and they'd decide it was obviously a bad idea, whereas thats not necessarily the case.

Oh my.

[NegativeK]

I fear that this post may be lost in the numbers surrounding it, but it needs to be said. First off, I'd like to give an example of how utterly tiny this thing will be. If the sun were to turn into a black hole instantly, its event horizon would have a 3km radius. For the sun, that's extraordinarily tiny. According to the article, this thing should have the mass of a couple hundred protons. That's, in case you can comprehend these numbers, 1.67*10^-25. Now, the radius of this bugger will be that times 1.48*10^-27. Yeah. That's FREAKING TINY. 2.47*10^-52 tiny. Many many many orders of magnitude less than the Planck distance.

Now, to address another issue. Hawking radiation is a pretty solidly entrenched idea. Particle and anti-particle pairs do form in space - the existance of the particles which are a part of it have been experimentally verified through the Casimir effect, which is Googleable. So worries about that not happening are pretty unnecessary. And, as many others have stated, these microscopic black holes have been forming and evaporating all the times due to cosmic rays right above our heads.

For those who wish to learn more about black hole physics, I have to suggest an excellent source for the layman: Jillian's Guide to Black Holes. She can explain things in simple terms, and has some hefty gravitational wave and Penrose diagrams for the really interested.

Oh, and P.S.: If the world really is sucked up by a black hole, it'll be a saving grace for all of the physicists who have been extraordinarily wrong for the past three-quarters of a century. ^-^

And yet another P.S.: For those physicists out there, what interesting things start to happen with black holes at scales this much past the Planck length? I believe that I've read somewhere about quantum gravity showing up heavily, but I'm unsure. =)